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1.3.3-Columbina
Brick!Club 1.3.3 Four and Four HUGO THAT IS THE SAME THING AS YESTERDAY’S TITLE. And, look, I am just, I know everything is about to turn bad, but that quadruple date sounds adorable. Will somebody please take me on this date? So, as Favourite is running about having fun, Dahlia and Zephine are making sure they look pretty, and Fantine is actually having a conversation? (With Dahlia and Zephine’s men, no less!) Either way, here we kind of have Fantine’s backstory that works just like Valjean’s, to set up why this person who you might condemn if you met them on the street is actually a really good person who just made one bad decision because of some unfortunate circumstances and it ruined their life. Except with Valjean, we start with a convict and then go plot twist! he used to be a pretty decent bloke! and with Fantine we go she was a virginal goddess! and then plot twist! half of that sentence was not exactly true. For both of them, their Bad Decisions do come out of… I was going to say love, but it’s hard to say just how much Valjean really loved his nieces and nephews, but let’s go with affection, at the very least. I kind of want to complain about getting all this physical description for Fantine when I’m still curious about her childhood, but it was really the same for Valjean - we only got details about the circumstances that led to his bad decision, and for Fantine, her inner modesty and chastity are those circumstances? Because if she’d known the things the other girls seem to know, she might have avoided her Situation, but if she knew those things then she wouldn’t be this bastion of modesty and chastity and decency and virginity and all those wonderful things and we probably wouldn’t be meant to feel so bad about her Fall. Still, it’s half a chapter of “She was such a great person, everything a woman should be, barely even human in her incredible perfection, etc, etc, etc”. She wasn’t like Those Other Girls in their low-necked dresses! Which always rubs me the wrong way but, sigh, what are you going to do. Finally, I feel like this post makes it sound like I’m not a fan of Fantine when I actually completely am? I think in trying to be critical, (in an objective, not a cynical, sense!) I’ve gone too far to the other side, because I actually LOVE AND ADORE MODESTY AND CHASTITY AND ALL THOSE GOOD THINGS. And that is a hard point of view to defend on Tumblr because sometimes it is hard to make people realise that just because you love those sorts of girls doesn’t mean you don’t like girls who aren’t all about modesty and chastity? Commentary Pilferingapples Columbina, if I manage to pull off the whole Meetup idea, then I Propose Donkeys. We can even look at a shrub. SUPER EXCITES. And I totally hear you on the discomfort with the era’s purity fixations; it’s of course totally possible to be pro-modesty without being anti-EVERY OTHER OPTION, and I’d expect (and hope) that’s what most of the people I regularly chat with favor. But I’m sure it made Fantine much more sympathetic to the audience of her day, and it was so essential they sympathize with her— not least so they would also sympathize with Cosette. Sarah1281 While it was probably different then and just knowing how innocent you are made you less innocent, I don’t think that Fantine knowing about sex and making the decision not to engage in it made her any less pure. It seems that would make her even more modest and chaste since it would be a choice she was making and not just that she is having no sex because what is sex? Columbina (reply to Sarah1281) But she did have sex? Did you mean to say “would have made her any less pure”? I’m going to run with that, so let me know if that’s not what you meant, because it is early and I have only had one coffee. I’m really only comparing Fantine to the other three, and we don’t know if they were having sex or not because, fair enough Hugo, that information probably wasn’t necessary to the story. (But I am curious - people who Know Things, was it likely that the other girls loved their boys as wives as well?) If they weren’t, I doubt it was out of chastity (though it could have been and I would be all up for that!) because (UGH IT MAKES ME SICK TO TYPE THIS, THIS IS HUGO’S OPINION NOT MINE NOT MINE) their low-cut dresses are meant to imply that they were definitely trying to get the boy’s sexual interest. If they weren’t sleeping with them, it was probably more for the purposes of keeping them keen, possibly even getting lucky enough to lure them into marriage. Fantine wouldn’t (maybe) have known about things like “keeping them keen” or trying to “lure” someone into marriage, she was just like “I love him, he loves me, oh, this feels nice, but, honey, shouldn’t we wait until we’re married?” and maybe he said they would be, maybe he said no one would ever know, maybe he said “I thought you loved me, if you loved me you’d do this”, maybe she didn’t even ask because she was so confident that this love would end in marriage, maybe she didn’t even think about that because she was so in love and wanted to sleep with him! If the other girls were sleeping with their boys, I would say they were canny enough to be using whatever dubious 19th Century contraceptive methods they could get their hands on, and keeping a list of doctors who would perform abortions tucked away somewhere. (Or at least Favourite was, since no one else could read.) Information I doubt anyone bothered to share with Fantine. Those are the things she didn’t know, and if she had, or more to the point if she had known and made use of this information, she wouldn’t fit Hugo’s idea of purity. I mean, it’s not like there aren’t still people today who struggle to have sympathy for women who “play games” to “trick” men or women who use birth control. Sarah1281 (reply to Columbina's reply) I was trying to respond to this Because if she’d known the things the other girls seem to know, she might have avoided her Situation, but if she knew those things then she wouldn’t be this bastion of modesty and chastity and decency and virginity and all those wonderful things and we probably wouldn’t be meant to feel so bad about her Fall. Obviously she did start having sex. I just don’t see why her being aware of sex would have made her less of a bastion of modesty and chastity and decency. I actually lean the opposite way. Before she really knew about sex it didn’t say much about her that she wasn’t having it. No one, no matter what they are like, can have sex before they know what it is unless they’re forced or something. I think it would have made Fantine more chaste and modest if she had known and decided not to have sex until she fell in love. That probably wouldn’t be in keeping with her 1817 time period but I’ve never understood what was particularly virtuous of someone not doing something that they had no idea about. Columbina (reply to Sarah1281's reply) OH OKAY I SEE SORRY. I didn’t so much mean sex itself as the ways to avoid getting pregnant from it / advantages to not having it, relationship-wise. I hadn’t really thought about what she actually knew about sex - she’s not completely ignorant, she knows that’s why she has a baby and she knows she shouldn’t have done it out of wedlock, so, you know, I guess she picked up the birds and the bees somewhere. So I think to that extent, she definitely knew what she was doing. And you’re exactly right, she was chaste because she was having sex because she was in love, whereas the other girls were only mucking around with the boys. If they weren’t having sex, it was for ulterior motives, not chaste ones (in my headcanon) and if they were, it wasn’t because they were in love, because they weren’t, or at least, not like Fantine was. She is more innocent for having rushed headlong into it because she was in true, pure, wonderful love than the other girls are for not having sex, but for calculating reasons. It never occurred to Fantine that Tholomyes might leave her, because Love, and that naive belief in love is part of her innocence, while the other girls know this won’t last more than a few weeks so enjoy it while it lasts but be careful how much of your heart / body you give this boy.